by Robert Irwin
In many ways his driest and most difficult work is also the most interesting. In his Grammaire arabe (1810, second edition 1831), he aimed, first, to set out the grammar of the Arabic language in what he judged to be the logical way and then in the way that the Arab grammarians used it. The two were, of course, quite different. The logic of his grammar was strongly influenced by the logic and grammar of Port Royal. The monastery of Port Royal, near Paris, produced two massively influential works, the Grammaire générale et raisonnée de Port Royal (1660) and La Logique; ou, L’Art de penser (1662). The Jansenist grammarians of Port Royal upheld the Cartesian view that the general features of grammatical structures are common to all languages – also a view that in modern times has been taken up by Noam Chomsky, in particular, in his Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought (1966). The Port Royal grammarians believed in the isomorphism of language, thought and reality – that is to say that language mirrored thought and thought in turn mirrored reality. (I am reminded of a certain French general who is alleged to have remarked that ‘It seems to me that French is the most perfect of all languages because its grammar exactly reflects the way I think.’)
Logic apart, de Sacy was also obsessed with irregularities and rarities. In this he had much in common with the medieval Arab grammarians and lexicographers whom he studied with so much enthusiasm. In particular, the grammarians of ninth-century Kufa in Iraq interested themselves in irregularities and anomalies, in contradistinction to the grammarians of nearby Basra who preferred to stress the normative and regular features of the language. Medieval Arabic grammars were backward-looking texts, as their compilers did not seek to register the way Arabic was actually spoken or written in their own lifetimes, but rather they sought to deduce from linguistic lore how Arabic had been spoken at the time of the revelation of the Qur’an to the Prophet.2 There was thus a striking parallel between the nahw, or ‘way’, of Arabic grammar and the Sunna or custom of the Prophet, that is to say the orally transmitted corpus of reports about his sayings and doings and those of his immediate companions. De Sacy intended that his grammar should replace Erpenius’s Grammatica Arabica and in particular that the new grammar should break free from the Latinate structure that Erpenius had imposed upon Arabic grammar. To some extent de Sacy was successful and he was a pioneer in introducing Arabic technical terms into his grammar. Though the Göttingen Orientalist Heinrich Ewald later criticized the grammar for following Arabmodels too closely, a modern student of that grammar (if it is possible to envisage such a person) would probably be more struck by its Latinate approach. Besides his researches based on Arabic texts, de Sacy also published on the pre-Islamic antiquities of Persia, Persian grammar, the writings attributed to the Persian poet al-Attar, the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics, a history of the kings of Mauritania and Samaritan texts. This was an age when the Orientalist was expected to spread himself rather widely.
Since de Sacy was a fervent Christian, it was more or less inevitable that he should regard Muhammad as a skilled impostor. However, de Sacy was less interested in mainstream Islam than he was in its various schismatic, secretive and sometimes subversive movements. Having lived through the horrors of the Jacobin terror, he projected his horror of revolutionary conspiracy backwards into the early history of Islam and presented the Druzes, the Isma‘ilis and Nusayris as forerunners of such sinister modern movements as the Freemasons, Carbonari and Jacobins. In the introduction to his Exposé de la religion des Druzes (1838), he declared that he had been impelled to write this book by ‘the desire that this portrait of one of the most notorious follies of the human spirit may serve to teach men who take pride in the superiority of their enlightenment what aberrations human reason is capable of when it is left to itself’. De Sacy’s Druzes were atheistic revolutionaries who drew upon Shi‘ite political fanaticism and a mixture of Greek and Persian philosophy. He found plenty in polemical Sunni Muslim sources to support his prejudices. He spent his whole career working on and off on the Druzes. (His views on Oriental secretive quasimasonic fanatics were pretty similar to those of von Hammer-Purgstall (on whom see below).
De Sacy had strong views on other matters too. In the previous century Montesquieu had argued, on the basis of a fairly superficial knowledge of Oriental history and society, that in Oriental despotisms all the land belonged to the prince and there were no civil laws regarding property, or succession, or commerce, or rights of women. (As we have already seen, Dr Johnson had grumbled that Montesquieu was always able to dredge up the practices of some obscure and exotic culture in order to support whatever argument he wished to make.) Drawing upon the Description de l’Egypte, as well as the fifteenth-century Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi’s topographical Khitat, Silvestre de Sacy produced a lengthy treatise on Egyptian land tenure specifically in order to refute Montesquieu. To take another issue, de Sacy’s brief career in the Royal Court of Moneys had given him strong views on sound money. Here again he found support for his views in al-Maqrizi who, in his view, was a much sounder man than most financial theorists in contemporary Europe. De Sacy was pleased to discover that the Fatimid Egyptian caliphs, unlike some foolish modern governments, realized that the ratio of gold to silver must be variable. ‘Doubtless one will note with pleasure that Maqrizi had ideas about true monetary principles which are more correct than many writers in our own century.’3
THE INTELLECTUAL LEGACY OF SILVESTRE DE SACY
After the deaths of Schultens and Reiske, there were no Orientalists of first rank until the appearance of de Sacy, and by the time he died most of the remaining Orientalists of first rank had been trained by him. As Daniel Reig has remarked, with Silvestre de Sacy ‘Orientalism… entered the libraries and at times even shut itself up in them’. But Reig also notes that Orientalism did not totally abandon the salons.4 Indeed, despite de Sacy’s ferocious scholarship and personal austerity, he did in fact frequent the salons, where he met Prosper Mérimée, Stendhal and Sainte-Beuve among others. De Sacy was a thoroughly political animal and hence his success in establishing chairs in Oriental studies and setting up learned panels, societies and journals. A large part of his achievement was in establishing Orientalist institutions that would survive him. Although he was hardly the first Orientalist (think of Postel, Pococke and Erpenius), it was de Sacy more than any other who created Orientalism as a sustained discipline with a regular flow of teachers, students, rituals of intellectual initiation and academic standards.
As has been noted, de Sacy was one of the founders of the Société Asiatique in 1821 and this was followed in 1823 by the first issue of the Société’s Journal Asiatique. Substantially earlier, in 1784 William Jones had set up the Asiatick Society of Bengal and its attendant learned journal, Asiatick Researches. Britain’s Royal Asiatic Society (1823) and its Journal drew its inspiration from Jones’s institution. The American Oriental Society was founded in 1842 and the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft was established in 1845 (with its Zeitschrift starting to appear four years later). In the long run, these societies and periodicals would provide important support for institutional Orientalism.5
However, this was in the long run and the present chapter deals chiefly with individuals and the motives, passions and rivalries of those individuals. For a long time there was no cohesion in the world of the Orientalist. Their first Congress took place in Paris only in 1873. Moreover, in the nineteenth century the learned societies of Orientalists were not yet what they have since become, the adjuncts of academic Orientalism. They were largely the province of enthusiastic amateurs, often leisured aristocrats or clergymen. Throughout the nineteenth century the presidency of the Royal Asiatic Society was monopolized by earls, knights and right honourables. A fair number of maharajas and other Indian princes were also members.6 The articles that appeared in the Orientalist journals were not systematically refereed (as is the rule nowadays). The bulk of the articles consisted of Oriental texts and sometimes their attempted decipherment or t
ranslation. There was little in the way of analysis or synthesis. The Orientalist societies, like most nineteenth-century societies, were male institutions; female Orientalists did not make their mark until the twentieth century.
At first relatively little space was devoted to Arabmatters in the heavyweight Orientalist periodicals. The Journal Asiatique’s coverage was somewhat weighted towards the Far East. There were a lot of articles in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society about ancient cultures and such controversial matters as the decipherment of cuneiform. Also, since many of the contributors had served in India as administrators or soldiers, there were many articles about Sanskrit studies, Pali texts, early Indian Buddhism and so forth. If there was a connection between nineteenth-century imperialism and Orientalism, it was chiefly this – that imperial servants, lonely and bored in remote outposts, took up the study of exotic languages and histories as their hobby. William Muir, who wrote about the history of the caliphs, and Charles Lyall, who published marvellous editions and translations of pre-Islamic poetry, are only two of the most prominent examples of amateur scholars who first took up the study of early Arabculture while serving in India.7
The coverage of the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft was also heavily weighted towards Indian matters. Although the Germans had no empire in India, they were fascinated by their Aryan origins, which they traced back to ancient India. Moreover, the heavy stress on philological studies in German universities fostered the study of Sanskrit and its links with other Indo-Aryan languages. The Indian Brahmans distinguished between Aryan and non-Aryan, equating this with civilized and non-civilized, and this theme was taken up in the first place by German Orientalists.8 It is one of the threads that feeds into modern European racism. On the other hand, the study of India’s ancient cultures by German and other Orientalists is part of the background to the ‘Bengal renaissance’ and, beyond that, to the rise of Indian nationalism, as ancient India’s past was explored and lost classics of Sanskrit literature were rediscovered.9
It was inevitable that French Orientalism in the first half of the nineteenth century should be dominated by de Sacy’s students. The most prominent of these was Etienne-Marc Quatremère (1782–1857). Like de Sacy, Quatremère was a Jansenist and like de Sacy he loathed the French Revolution. He had had an exciting, that is to say horrible, childhood, as after his father was executed by a revolutionary tribunal he and his mother had to go into hiding with peasants in the countryside. Like de Sacy, he was educated in the classics and largely self-taught in Hebrew. He fell under the master’s spell at the Ecole spéciale des langues orientales vivantes and learned Arabic with him. He worked for a while in the Bibliothèque Impériale, before becoming Professor of Hebrew, Chaldaic and Syriac at the Collège de France in 1819. He was a hard worker with wide interests and, among other things, he worked on Phoenician, Pharaonic inscriptions, and Persian and Mamluk Egyptian history. As far as Mamluk history is concerned, he edited and translated part of al-Maqrizi’s chronicle, the Kitab al-Suluk, under the title Histoire des sultans mamlouks, de l’Égypte, not because he had all that much interest in the history of Mamluk Egypt, but rather because he was fascinated by the vocabulary of fifteenth-century Arabic and particularly in those lexicographic nuggets that had not been defined in the standard Arabic dictionaries. As a consequence, his lexical footnotes ran on for page after page, often reducing the text they were supposed to be commenting on to two or three lines at the top of the page.
Like his teacher, Quatremère was a passionate philologist in an age when philology was thought of as one of the cutting-edge sciences. Nietzsche described philology as ‘slow reading’. Nineteenth-century philologists believed that by correct application of their techniques they could not only discover lost languages but also reconstitute the ancient societies that had used those languages. Quatremère believed in close attention to philological detail and he did not allow himself to speculate or generalize about the materials that he studied. However, he sometimes found himself at odds with German philologists, when he perceived that their researches on the language of the Old Testament were leading to conclusions that threatened his fervently held Christian belief. The German Arabist Freytag accused him of wanting to reserve the whole field of Arabic studies to himself.10
One other publication of his is worth pausing on. That is his edition of the Muqaddimah, Prolégomènes d’Ebn Khaldun: texte arabe (1859). De Sacy had first discovered Ibn Khaldun and included extracts in his Chrestomathie. Subsequently, another of de Sacy’s students, the Irish expatriate William MacGuckin, Baron de Slane (1801–78), translated the Muqaddimah into French. Among other things, de Slane used his translation to mount an onslaught on the scholarship of Quatremère. The Dutch Orientalist Reinhart Dozy suggested that the edition was the product of senility.11 Franz Rosenthal, a twentieth-century Orientalist, who translated the Muqaddimah into (rather awkward) English, described Quatremère as ‘a scholar of great merits but also, it seems, one who was at odds with his colleagues and with the world in general’.12 He was erudite, austere, reclusive and, in general, the epitome of what most people then thought an Orientalist should be. As for the Muqaddimah itself, in this great work, the North African philosopher and historian Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) set forth a philosophy of history based upon the cyclical rise and fall of dynasties. A new dynasty was brought to power by tribal armies held together by ‘asabiyya (roughly ‘social solidarity’), but within a few generations that same dynasty, enfeebled by sedentarization and luxury, would be brought down by an invasion by fresh bands of vigorous nomads. Arnold Toynbee, in his A Study of History, described the Muqaddimah as ‘undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever been created by any mind in any time or place’ and there is more to Ibn Khaldun’s encyclopedic philosophy of history than can even be hinted at here. What is important for our purposes is that, in the long run, Ibn Khaldun’s ideas were to be immensely influential on the way Western Orientalists thought about North African history and about Islamic history more generally.13 Aloys Sprenger, Alfred von Kremer, Carl Heinrich Becker, David Ayalon, Albert Hourani and Marshall Hodgson were strongly affected by him and Ibn Khaldun was not just read by historians. The philosopher and sociologist Ernest Gellner was also strongly influenced by Ibn Khaldun (too strongly, I would say).14 Whether Ibn Khaldun’s impact on Western thought was entirely benign is debatable.
THE GERMANS ARE COMING
In addition to the students mentioned above, de Sacy taught quite a number of other distinguished French scholars, including Champollion, Rémusat, Burnouf, Reinaud and Garcin de Tassy (another Jansenist). Even so, though de Sacy exercised an enormous influence on French Orientalism, his influence on parallel developments in Germany and Russia is even more striking, but before considering the achievements and publications of his German disciples, it is necessary first to turn to a contemporary Orientalist whose approach to Eastern texts was quite different. The Austrian Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856) started out as a dragoman and interpreter in the Levant. He mastered, with varying degrees of competence, Turkish, Persian and Arabic. On his return to Europe he was employed by the Austrian Chancery and ennobled as a baron. From 1807 onwards, he settled in Vienna and produced a series of books, articles and translations on Oriental topics.15 Though Hammer-Purgstall and de Sacy corresponded and co-operated on, among other things, the periodical known as both Mines de l’Orient and Fundgruben des Orients (Vienna, 1809–18), Hammer-Purgstall, unlike his French colleague, was a prolific and careless writer. He had no academic training and he was full of ideas and insights, many of which were not only wrong but also slightly mad. His main work was the ten-volume history of the Ottoman empire, Geschichte des Osmanisches Reiches (1827–35), which is not much more than an uncritical compilation of Turkish and Greek source material gutted and ordered approximately according to chronology, but such is the slow progress of Oriental studies that it still features in bibliographies today. He also wrote
a history of Persian literature, Geschichte der schönen Redekünste Persiens (1818). His translations in that history as well as in numerous articles on Persian poets such as Hafiz of Shiraz and Jalal al-Din Rumi inspired both Goethe and Ralph Waldo Emerson – which is surprising, as Hammer-Purgstall’s translations are clumsy and ugly. His Arabic seems to have been worse than his Persian and the twentieth-century Arabist, R. A. Nicholson, remarked of Hammer-Purgstall’s rendering of a mystical poem by Ibn al-Farid that ‘“translation” of a literary work usually implies that some attempt has been made to understand it, I prefer to say that Hammer rendered the poem into German rhymed verse by a method peculiar to himself, which appears to have consisted in picking out two or three words in each couplet and filling the void with any ideas which might strike his fancy’.16 Hammer Purgstall’s enthusiasm for Oriental poetry and romance was limitless, but rather woolly.